Season 36 - Jane Eyre (2006-2007)
There are only a handful of miniseries that I allow to be categorized as my favorites. They are sheer perfection and I return to them again and again because I love them so much. Wives and Daughters starring Keeley Hawes, Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth, The Forsyte Saga starring Damian Lewis, and a dozen more, these aren't just seminal to me, they made me who I am. As did Jane Eyre. This adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson will forever be the best adaptation of a Bronte book. Period. I came to Jane Eyre's story by such a roundabout route, watching different adaptations over the years on cable while never picking up the book. Ironically my first literary experience of the world created by Charlotte was actually in Jasper Fforde's book The Eyre Affair. I first learned to love Edward Rochester as filtered through another author after first experiencing him through countless adaptations. After all this data from so many different mediums I finally went to the source and fell in love with the book. Here's a fact about me that I promise is relevant to this discussion of Jane Eyre. Before I fell in love with books I loved movies. In fact I remember one TA in college asking why I was studying art and not films. I really didn't have an answer for him, other than I had nebulous thoughts that while I was going to continue making art forever films were more just a form of entertainment for me and I had no interest in really making them. Criticizing them yes... But that's a different career path and actually kind of what I do on this blog... Where I was going with this is that for a long time books needed to be adapted for me to reach their "final iteration." This is actually a hotly debated subject, because books as books are their final form and they don't need a movie or miniseries to make them more real. But there was the old me and the new me and the old me needed to see Jane Eyre on screen. And there was Rochester on screen. THERE HE WAS! It wasn't Maggie Smith's son, it was Rochester. Even the scene where he first meets Jane on that rainy road as I first saw it in my mind in The Eyre Affair was exactly how I pictured it. Now I'm not saying that a perfect adaptation is only perfect for finding one moment and making it exactly as I saw it, I'm just saying, seeing my vision on screen for even a second made me sit up and pay attention and fall in love with this adaptation irrevocably.
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